by Laura Gill
Servants set up a trestle table before the hearth, as it was the custom to feast honored guests on their first night in the citadel. I had little appetite, and had to choke down the roast meat, bread, and vegetables my aunt pressed upon me. “Eat something, Orestes,” she said. “You are all skin and bones.”
“Leave him be,” Strophius rumbled amiably. “He’s still full from this morning.”
Swallow your tears and be a man. I had to hold in my tumultuous emotions, breathe deeply, and hold my chin high like a king’s son just to struggle through the meal. Anaxibia watched me like a mother hen, which did not help.
It was a leisurely meal, during which the sun began sinking. Servants lit lamps in the vestibule. After the dessert course of melons and cakes, which I did not touch, Pylades went over to the hearth to pour the third libation. “Sing for us, Pietros,” he told the bard, who had assumed his customary place beside the fire. An audience, drawn by the news that Agamemnon’s son had arrived at court, had started to gather.
Cradling his seven-stringed lyre, the bard stood and bowed to the king. “What shall I sing tonight, my lord?”
Strophius nodded toward me. “Let Prince Orestes choose.”
No doubt the courtiers seated around the hearth expected me to ask for a song about Father’s great deeds. All I wanted was to forget my family’s blood-soaked history. “Singer,” I said. “Give us the Song of Jason.”
Pietros tuned the lyre, tested the strings with his ivory plectrum, and began to chant the opening stanzas of the hero’s song. Soon, my choice came back to sting me. Jason’s father, too, had been murdered by a rival kinsman, who then seized the throne of Iolkos. Timon once told me that the real Jason had been more pirate than dispossessed prince, and cared more for adventure and riches than revenge. All I saw was the lonely boy fleeing into the wilderness with a faithful servant.
Pietros did not sing the entire song that night, for it was a long tale with many episodes, to be spread over many evenings. I thanked the bard for his performance, though my heart was not in it, and my kinsmen for their hospitality.
Anaxibia’s women had prepared a chamber for me near the royal apartments. My aunt accompanied me upstairs, stayed while a servant undressed me, and remained long enough to tuck me into the bed with its fine linens and soft fleeces. “Sleep well, Orestes,” she said. “Tomorrow morning, you and your uncle will go to the sanctuary to offer a libation to your father’s shade.”
Sleep did not come easily, especially not in such a comfortable bed after weeks lying on the hard ground or on straw ticking. Even though my surroundings were different from my familiar room, my consciousness inevitably drifted back to that last night in the palace of Mycenae. Father had still been alive then, no doubt relishing the prospect of his triumphant homecoming, with no idea that the very next day would be his last on earth.
I flogged myself with self-recrimination and grief. I envisioned Father slumped over in his bath of blood; that image would be burned into my mind forever, after every other memory fled. I pictured Aegisthus seated upon the Lion Throne, wielding the king’s scepter. Tears started in my eyes. I could have stopped all that, had I not been such a coward. Coward. Like the baby I was, I cried myself to sleep.
Morning brought a physician to examine my injured thigh. Ainios could scarcely believe that a mere twelve-year-old boy had cauterized his own wound. He prodded the skin surrounding the scar, which hurt, and had me walk on the leg. “The muscle is torn and still healing,” he said. “You shouldn’t have walked on it so soon.”
“I had no choice,” I answered.
Ainios prescribed a regimen of light exercise with rest and hot compresses. “You’re young,” he said. “With enough care and effort you might avoid permanent lameness, but I suspect this wound will give you trouble later in life.”
After breakfast, Strophius took me to the sanctuary of Hades and Persephone, which stood well apart from the palace on a hillside overlooking the royal tombs. Pylades met us outside the sacred precinct with the sacrificial black ram. As we entered, two acolytes took the animal and trussed him on the altar.
Three priestesses sang the invocation to the dark god and his queen, and to slap the ground with their hands to summon them. In their fluttering black garments and chalk-white paint, wailing their funereal dirge, they were creatures of the night, the three Fates awaiting the pleasure of the Lord of the Dead.
Strophius touched my shoulder. “Do you know what to do?”
I nodded. An acolyte held a basin for me to wash my hands. Strophius handed me the knife. A priestess sprinkled salted meal over the ram’s curling horns, and then it was time. I plunged the knife point into the carotid artery to sever it, slicing across the animal’s throat as Hyrtios had taught me to do. Hot blood ran out over my hands.
Shrieking like maenads, the priestesses swarmed in around the twitching ram to gather the blood in a silver basin. Those ululating screams awakened my terror. I dropped the knife with shaking hands and covered my face, only my hands were slick with blood, and the smell elicited memories. “It was my fault!”
He gathered me in his arms, despite the blood. “You had nothing to do with what happened.”
I smelled the saffron impregnating the wool of his tunic; that was so like my father’s natural odor, or how I remembered it to be. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to be such a coward.”
Strophius stroked my hair a moment longer, then withdrew from the embrace. “Wash your hands, young man, and come with me.”
He led me away from the hillside sanctuary, away from the wailing priestesses and the blood, to the megaron. The great court stood deserted; the king would not hear petitions that day. A sharp order delivered to the scrub maids scouring the central hearth sent them scurrying for hot water and towels.
My uncle directed me to a curtained doorway. I hung back, even though it was an altogether different lustral bath, and altogether different frescoes decorated the walls, and an altogether different black granite tub stood in the corner.
“Come, Orestes.” Strophius stood in the middle of the chamber, lamp in hand, and gestured. “This is where the kings of Phocis cleanse themselves after battle, and ritually wash away their impurities.”
“No,” I gasped. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can,” the king said gravely.
Blood. A smear of red marred the doorjamb where I touched it; I had not washed my hands before leaving the sanctuary. Father’s face suddenly swam before my eyes, his graying beard clotted with gore, the light in his eyes fading. “It won’t ever wash away,” I groaned. “I knew Aegisthus was there. I saw him go into the alcove to hide, but I never called out a warning, never said or did anything. I just stood there and did nothing!” Making a fist, I punched the doorjamb. “I killed him!”
Strophius took a step toward me. “Orestes...”
“I killed him!”
Then, someone seized me from behind. I started, struggled against my assailant. “Orestes!” Pylades’ voice hissed in my ear. His arms tightened around my middle. “Calm down.”
“Let me go!”
Pylades then hooked his arms under mine to drag me from the doorway. Locked together, we stumbled to the floor. Pylades with his greater strength and reach deftly maneuvered me into a wrestling hold, pinning me face down. “Stop crying, Orestes!” he snapped. I was shaking all over, groaning and weeping. Saliva dribbled from my mouth onto the painted stucco.
He released me only when the tempest ebbed, and then only enough to let me sit up and breathe; he maintained a firm hold on my arm, and hauled me to my feet a moment later. Strophius stood to one side, observing as the servant women carried water into the bathroom. “Come, Orestes,” he said again, extending his hand. “A king is also a priest. I can wash you clean.”
Pylades marched me unresisting into the chamber, so the women could undress me and help me step into the steaming water.
But I wept as my uncle poured hot cleansing water over my
head, and spoke the invocation to the god. “Lord Apollo, Divine Healer, hearken to Strophius, your high priest. Look now upon this boy, Orestes, son of Agamemnon. He is tormented in both body and mind. He has witnessed the murder of his father. He carries a heavy burden of guilt. Ease his afflictions.”
A priestess suddenly appeared among the bath attendants. Not at all like the tattered black-robed Harpies from earlier, this servant of the god looked more like a goddess than a woman. Her open bodice displayed gilded breasts, and her face was a white moon under her circular headdress. Tattooed serpents slithered around her arms. She dipped the laurel branch she held into the water, shaking the bough to sprinkle me with the droplets; the leaves brushed against my head and torso, releasing a fragrant scent. “Spirits of affliction,” she intoned. “Be gone from this mortal supplicant!”
Strophius set his hand atop my head. “Son of Agamemnon, reveal the horrors in your heart. Confess your woes to the god.”
I wept into the water, and let the horrors spill forth. I was a coward, a failure of a son sworn to avenge a murdered father by murdering his mother who had murdered his father to avenge her murdered daughter. What a terrible web of self-destruction the Fates had woven around the House of Atreus! And with each confession, Strophius sluiced my head and shoulders, symbolically rinsing away the pollution. The bath water appeared to turn black, colored as it was by the black marble of the tub, and my legs under the surface appeared distorted and cast in shadow. I was awash in the Styx. Of course, it was not so, merely a reflection of my own dark mood.
After a time, my weeping began to subside. I felt tired and burnt out, and miserable. Strophius took my hand then and lifted it out of the water. “Behold. It has gone forth from you.” I saw my fingers, bright red and wrinkled. “You have been cleansed.”
I did not believe him. Absolution could not simply be matter of immersing oneself in water and cataloguing one’s sins. There had to be much more. There had to be suffering, sacrifice.
Upstairs, Anaxibia gave me a sleeping draught, though it was not yet midday. “I know you did not sleep well last night,” she said admonishingly, sounding for all the world like Kilissa, “and after your injury and long journey, you need your rest.”
She should have left me alone, to deal with my hurts in a less intrusive manner. Her concoction of poppies and milk brought no ease, only triggered visions that perpetuated the horror and remorse the bath should have washed away.
I did not fall asleep, but lay in a haze, contemplating the swallows in flight upon the bedchamber wall. Slowly, the birds blurred into motion, each swallow transforming into a labrys, black edged with scarlet, and as the swallow-axes hovered there above the waving lilies of the field, they changed yet again, mutating into butterflies with grotesque female heads. Magic freed them from the wall’s flat dimension and allowed them to descend upon me, and circle above my head, while their beating wings dripped blood onto my upturned face and the bedclothes. Orestes. Son of Agamemnon. You are doomed. Doomed. The curse breeds in you even now.
I beat at them with my hands, crying out, but they were remorseless, relentless. One butterfly settled onto the pillow, leaking blood from her tiny proboscis. One landed upon my head, bleeding into my hair, creating runnels that coursed down my brow along my cheeks to soak the white linens. The third continued to circle the air above me, whispering, evading my every attempt to swat her away. Orestes, Orestes! The curse breeds like maggots in you. You are foul with horrors, Orestes. You are doomed to languish in the very depths of Tartarus, with the blasphemers and child-killers. There is no escape for you, Orestes.
I woke at dusk, thick-headed and depressed, to discover that the blood had been an illusion; the linens were clean. Anaxibia brought a supper tray, coaxing me to take some porridge and raisins with a warning that my stomach would ache if I did not eat something. “Timon tells me you have had bad dreams,” she said.
“He was here?” I asked.
Anaxibia nodded slowly. “He says were you were mumbling and whimpering in your sleep, and pawing at your head.” She handed me a cup of goat’s milk, urging me to drink it down. “Perhaps I gave you a bit too much before.”
The scarlet and white swallows migrating across the wall were just birds now. Fearing what she might say, or what she would undoubtedly tell my uncle, I kept silent about my nightmare.
She stayed with me a while after I ate. Her jeweled fingers tenderly brushed the hair from my face as she reassured me with a mother’s soft voice. “Close your eyes, Orestes. Let Morpheus come and steal all your bad dreams away.”
I slept dreamlessly through the night, waking the next morning still feeling sluggish and downcast, and spent the day curled on my side, staring at the wall. Timon sat with me, after feeling my forehead to make certain I had no fever. “I would not tell anyone else this, but I myself have had a nightmare or two since arriving,” he confessed. “Ainios says it is normal, after such a scare.”
“The Erinyes came,” I mumbled.
“How do you know?” he asked.
I gazed at the wall behind him. The silent swallows seemed to mock me. “There were three. They kept whispering that I was doomed. Cursed.”
Timon remained silent for a moment. “You should not be thinking about such things now.”
“You know there is a double curse on my family. After all, you were the one who told me about it.” The words dropped like weights from my tongue. “When should I think about it?”
“Not now.” Another, longer pause. “When you are well enough to get up and plan what to do next.”
Later, I overheard my aunt and uncle debating the matter in the next room. Timon must have violated my confidence and said something to them. I lacked the energy to be angry with him.
“If his spirits don’t improve soon,” Strophius said, “I see no remedy but to take him to Delphi.”
Anaxibia chided him. “He lost his father in the worst possible way, and has been forced to survive on his own in the wilderness.” I heard vessels clink. “Give him a little time to grieve.”
Strophius rumbled his displeasure. “If the Erinyes are hounding him now, when he’s innocent, then what will they do when he’s truly guilty?”
“What do you mean, Husband?”
“You know well what I mean.”
A servant entered my chamber then with a lamp and clean water and linens for the washbasin, leaving me unable to hear any more. I frowned my annoyance, but the old woman did not notice.
The following morning, Strophius refused to allow me to languish in the bed. He woke me himself, stayed while I dressed, and made me eat breakfast with him. “I will receive petitioners later,” he said, “but we still have time to visit the cult house.”
I remembered last night’s overheard conversation. “At Delphi?”
He shook his head. “Here within the citadel.”
In the cult house’s main room stood an altar to all the male deities, with a painted offering table. Phocis’s patron god had his own special shrine in an antechamber; its walls depicted white-faced priestesses handling serpents and bearing laurel boughs. Apollo’s cult statue occupied a plinth above the altar. He was depicted as a kouros, a boy, with long black ringlets and an enigmatic smile, and in one hand he held an ivory scepter twined about with snakes.
We offered a libation of honeyed wine, and left milk for the house snake; which bewildered me, for in the Argive lands it was always women who handled and spoke to the serpents. Strophius explained how Phocian custom allowed priests of Apollo to interact with snakes, “Long ago, Gaia, Mother of the Mountains, ruled Parnassus. It was in my great-grandfather Aeacus’s time,” he said, “that Apollo arrived at Delphi, slew the sacred serpent Python, and took the oracle for his own. It was Aeacus who heard the god’s call and left his palace in Aegina to become the first high priest of Apollo at Delphi.”
I gazed up at the kouros. Apollo was originally an Anatolian god, a foreigner little known in the Argive lands. I did not
know whether or not this strange deity had the power to ease my affliction.
Pylades met us on the stairs returning to the palace. After paying his respects to his father, he greeted me by way of flinging a pair of himantes in my face. “You’re with me this morning.”
“Be gentle,” Strophius cautioned. “His wound has not yet healed.”
I resented the nonchalant manner in which my cousin shoved me around. “Where are you taking me?”
“Where do you think?” Pylades answered sharply. “You belong in the palaestra, with other young men, not brooding and moping upstairs with the women.”
Krisa’s palaestra was alive with activity. At least a dozen young men exercised on the sand. They ceased boxing, wrestling, and stretching to congregate around their prince as he, ignoring his father’s admonition to heed my injury, shoved me to the ground.
Laughter attended the insult, mockery which burned my ears. Pylades stripped off his tunic and tossed it to an attendant, all the while regarding me like an insect he intended to squash. How dare he treat a guest this way! I was a prince of Mycenae, not some peasant cripple he could torment for sport. I maneuvered onto one knee despite my aching thigh, gathered my muscles, and charged him like a bull.
Pylades had not been expecting the attack. He stumbled back a pace, but kept his balance, bracing his sturdy legs in the sand to stop my momentum. He wrapped both arms around my torso, and we went down together. Cheers erupted from the watching youths. I managed to keep him from rolling me onto my belly and pinning me facedown, yet, as I had discovered yesterday, he had the advantages of greater strength and mass. Straddling me, he tried to grasp my wrists to pin my arms. I shoved into his chest with my right hand, but there was no dislodging him.
An inspiration seized me. I reached between his thighs, found what I sought, and squeezed hard.
Pylades leapt back with a shout. All the young men had seen me grab his testicles, and were now laughing.